Sam Falls

“I work with photography because I see everything in front of me all the time, but the more I see the less I know what I want, you know? So I make pictures that try to resolve what might not be being seen, the underlying pattern of what I find interesting and understanding how this can be compounded. Each picture leads to the next, and usually there are formal connections, but not repetitive content – so it’s non-serial. At first it was easy to photograph what I wanted to see, it was about isolation and highlighting already existing reality. The deeper I go though, the more of a challenge it becomes, the more abstract the images get, the more I manufacture, and basically the more I’m starting to create something from scratch where I mix what I know and what I want to figure out – this seems to output a new object that implicates the viewer too. So it’s about me and it’s about you, but it’s not about me and you.

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It changes all the time, but usually there is a very concentrated period of actual photographing followed by a lot of sitting and looking at the image and then another dense period of either re-doing it or moving things around. Like recently I went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art a few times to photograph some paintings and sculptures I’d been thinking about and researching. I used my 4×5 and it was a bit taxing shooting like that in the museum light (no flash). When I got the photos back they looked great, but they also looked just like I thought they would, which was boring – they didn’t fully do what I thought they would. Then it’s like, what did I think they would do? and I have to sit with them and work that out and go further, flush it, then the actual work happens all through the night on the computer or by hand and re-photographing. When I wake up I see the image and it’s usually like what? Oh, fuck yeah! I work in my studio basically 5 pm to 12 am everyday painting and drawing and looking at things around my place and on the Internet and end up photographing a couple of these things so by the weekend there’s usually one or two prints being made.” – from an interview with Fecal Face